I think you will be struck, as I was, by the richness of these stories, and by the extraordinary variety — of theme, of mood, of style — to be found here. The only commonality, really, aside from their excellence, is that all of these stories are crime stories — which is to say that a crime or the threat of a crime is a central element in each of them.
The variety this affords is boundless. At the same time, however, I submit that crime is a defining element in a way that various topical themes are not. People have put together anthologies in which all of the stories are about dogs, say, or take place on shipboard, or involve children, and this sort of theme can make for a successful collection, but the common feature does not define the stories. Crime is somehow more generic — which, I suppose, helps explain why the mystery is very much a literary genre, and an enduring one.
It is, as you’ll see, one with a very broad canopy, a house with many mansions.
You may also be struck by the number of unfamiliar names in this volume’s table of contents. Two thirds of the writers whose stories I’ve selected are men and women whose names and work are new to me.
And this suggests to me that the short story — the mystery short story — is still the door through which many new writers emerge.
I think that’s a good thing. The whole mystery genre, we shouldn’t forget, originated in the short story. That, after all, is what Poe wrote.
And here are twenty hugely talented writers following in his dark footsteps. You have a treat in store for you. Enjoy!
Lawrence Block
Jennifer Anderson
Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster
From The Missouri Review
If I were a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabbits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads. Once I was a police officer for a very short time in Saint Amelia, an exclusive postage stamp of a town, and acquired an intimate knowledge of this landscape, four miles square, in the darkness of graveyard shift. Our uniform patches were comical — not authoritarian stars or eagles but orchid-hued grapes set against streaks of orange and green vineyard, glossy and enameled in appearance, which is how I thought of the town. I ached for sleep, longed to hold my sleeping husband’s body, drove the same streets over and over, turned at the same boundaries, waited for something to happen. Like a pinball moving constantly, bouncing against its limitations.
When my shift ended, I would hurry to my home in the city of Napa, thirty minutes south. My husband and I couldn’t afford to live in Saint Amelia; none of the cops who patrolled there could, except a couple of old-timers who’d bought property way back when. I’d race daybreak to my bedroom with tinfoil-lined windows, where I could preserve the illusion of night and sleep. Desires — for sleep, for my husband, for something unnameable — converged. My husband, a young assistant winemaker, smelled of bleach, wet cement floors, the brackish tip of a wine-soaked cork, wet stainless steel, sweat, oak, sun. When he’d been working in the limestone wine caves, which bloom with multicolored fungi and mold, his hair and skin would be infused with a heightened artificial scent of roses. When he slept, his skin was so warm, like chocolate left in the sun just as it reaches melting point, beaded with moisture. I wanted to press as many of the planes of my cold body against his as possible, quadriceps to hamstring, stomach to back, jaw to jaw. I’d undress and place my gun on my nightstand under an open book, and then, just as I’d fold back a corner of the blankets, dancing with joy inside like someone about to enter a hot bath, his alarm would go off, the third or fourth snooze alarm, the one that meant he was late.
In our twenties we were broke and blue, and my police job was important to us for the health insurance. The Napa Valley had lost its bucolic charm, and in moments of desperation I tried to talk my husband into moving to Czech Republic, Argentina, South Africa, any other winemaking region in the world where opportunities might exist for a young, ambitious American with talent but no connections. Napa Valley winemaking was a kind of Hollywood, which ironically is where my husband first worked; he had a film degree. Idealistically, he insisted that the job could be learned only by hands-on experience, that winemaking degrees were worthless. So we were outsiders from the start in a closed, incestuous industry where the demarcation between insider and outsider felt absolute. Then, at about the same time Saint Amelia hired me, he was hired as the assistant to a “cult” winemaker who had waiting lists to buy his mythic, perfect cab. We were still broke — but with a difference. We were on a path to the inner circle, my husband assured me, if we played things right. He’d spontaneously belt out, “I’ve got a golden ticket!” and then worry that if he appeared too happy, the gods might snatch it away.
Our primary form of entertainment when we were alone was telling each other stories that demystified the Valley. He’d tell me about tanks of white accidentally pumped into tanks of red and then say, “This is a small valley. Talking ruins careers.” He’d warn me that people might try to milk me for information. “Oh, please,” I’d say. “You didn’t have to sign a confidentiality agreement like I did.” I’d tell him about the mystery of the naked dead man, found face-down in front of a winery chateau. It was assumed at first that he’d leaped — or been pushed — from the third-story window. (In fact, as near as anyone could tell, he’d woken from a drunken sleep and mistaken the French doors, which opened on a thirty-foot drop, for the guest bathroom.) And I’d tell him the whole collection of pervert-in-the-vineyard stories the other cops liked to tell me on uneventful shifts. At first I thought they were teasing me, but I learned that every city, large or small, always has one crime, the sex crime. In the month before I’d been hired, two women — both lived in exclusive homes backing onto vineyards — reported waking in the night to find a strange man in their beds, touching them. At the first sign of struggle he disappeared into the darkness like some malevolent vineyard spirit, leaving them to wonder if they’d only dreamed.
I couldn’t believe they’d hired me. I couldn’t believe they’d given me a real badge and a real gun. I started working day shift during a hot week in November, the air heavy with decaying grape must, and everything seemed tinged with the erotic, from the creak of my new leather belt to the voice of my field training officer, Ken, a voice that made me think of the word patina. My first week on the job was grace week, a time to ride along and observe, free from daily scores and penalties, while Ken drove. Ken showed me secret roads through vineyards, hidden mansions, shortcuts through the gravel pit, all of which were routine to him but exhilarated me. He showed me places where chanterelles could be picked after rains. At first daylight he showed me the “snail lady” creeping through her neighbor’s dew-laden yards, plucking snails and sticking them to her arms, chest, cheeks, until, heavily barnacled, she brought them home to mesh crates, fed and cleaned them and sold them to restaurants. I sometimes felt like a girl cruising with her boyfriend, and when Ken drove me to the secluded Upper Reservoir and commented on the quality of light on the water and the ivy-tangled ruins of a ghost winery, I had a sudden ludicrous and sickening image of us embracing, the hard shells of our body armor knocking, our utility belts bristling about us like porcupine quills.